Language Arts

By Cedar Sigo
Publication Date: April 2014

ISBN# 9781933517858 (7 x 10.5, 72pp, trade paper)
ISBN# 9781933517865 (7 x 10.5, 72pp, limited edition hardcover)

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• Language Arts, like Cedar Sigo, is playfully spontaneous. Sigo uses poetry as a way to record his own adventures as a reader, traveler, lover, poet, friend, and he welcomes the reader to share the experience. The pleasure he gets in writing these poems is infectious, and the resulting collection is absorbing for its movement, personality, and music.
  

• Sigo's own affectations and form are particularly notable in his ranging between choppy, across-the-page banter and flowing, long-lined lyrics. Sigo's drive to reassemble broken language into poems that ring of truth-in-experience earn him his most arresting moments.
  Publishers Weekly
  
  Picture a lover’s bedroom, sexily yet maddeningly littered with cigarettes and crumpled clothes, half-drunk coffee, wine glasses with lipstick around the rim, piles of papers, etc. A view of the mountains, or Paris, through the open window. The chaos is exciting, slightly overwhelming, and arousing. Being inside Language Arts is like this.
  Ansley Clark, The Volta
  
  Cedar trains the ear for surprise of sound and a prosody that was born of childhood prayer, exposure to native tongue, and an understanding of musical composition. You enter a foreign landscape and exit much wiser.
  Jen Fitzgerald, New Books in Poetry
  
  

• Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the editor of There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera, on Joanne Kyger (forthcoming from Wave Books, 2017), and author of eight books and pamphlets of poetry, including Royals (forthcoming from Wave Books, 2017), Language Arts (Wave Books, 2014), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), and two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005). He has taught workshops at St. Mary’s College, Naropa University, and University Press Books. He lives in San Francisco.